Jason Buffington .com

  • Corporate data protection poses same challenges as BYOD

    These days, IT no longer has the same influence over what laptop, tablet or smartphone users choose. In the age of BYOD, IT must accommodate for the devices that users prefer. I call this phenomenon “the audacity of BYOD.” Data protection is heading down a similar path. Today, the backup administrator is no longer the…

  • ROBO backup necessary for ample corporate data protection

    Corporate data needs to be protected to a corporate standard, even if the servers don’t reside within corporate data center walls. There are three locations where data might reside within your environment: data centers, endpoint devices and remote office or branch offices (ROBO) data. In general, we might make two over-simplistic recommendations: Data center servers…

  • Backing up virtual machines doesn’t have to hurt

    Backing up virtual servers was a serious challenge for a number of years. Even today, many shops use traditional, agent-based backup to protect virtual servers. But it’s a classic example of something working well until it doesn’t. Virtual server backup has a threshold of sorts. If you just need to protect a few, or even…

  • Backup as a service isn’t for everyone

    Having spent 25 years in data protection, with several early years in channel and field-sales roles, I’ve noticed three common things that backup vendors don’t seem to realize about channel partners. 1. Not every VAR/SI should become a backup service provider Some vendors assume that they can help every one of their partners become backup…

  • Tape backup, cloud-based backups make sense for your organization

    Over the last several years, many organizations have at least partially transitioned from writing backups to local tape libraries to creating cloud-based backups. One of the primary obstacles that organizations may encounter along the way is that many of the major backup applications are designed to either work with virtual tape libraries or with proprietary,…

  • Virtual machine backups remedy outdated legacy backups

    Increasing your use of server virtualization is one of the easiest ways to prove that your backup process is antiquated. In other words: If 20% of your server infrastructure is virtualized, you may be able to use any approach to virtual machine (VM) backups that you want, including agents inside each VM and a backup…